This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's September 14 New Orleans Issue. Subscribe today!
BEFORE LEBRON JAMES scored a single point in the NBA, he was already an 18-year-old multimillionaire, signing a $90 million deal with Nike. James embodied a millennial template of success: money before accomplishment, celebrity before résumé, certainty of position without experience. It was the equivalent of striking gold before having discovered it.
In the river of his claim, James was the mother lode. He delivered the flakes, the rocks, the gold mine underneath -- but he was also the exception. Robert Griffin III, in spectacular fashion, represents what happens when the water glitters but there is no gold.
Griffin's saga seems so obvious and foolish and predestined. The prospectors from his sponsors paid him and marketed him. ESPN took the lead in hyping him. The jerseys sold. Media and fans projected hopes of postracialism and civil rights leadership on a person with no real history of social activism. Books were written on him. Griffin did the rest, absorbing it, believing it, referring to himself as if he were a peer of Tom Brady and Peyton Manning and Aaron Rodgers.
"If you want to look at the good teams in this league and the great quarterbacks," Griffin said infamously after a loss in 2014, "the Peytons and the Aaron Rodgers, those guys don't play well if their guys don't play well. They don't." He played the most dangerous sport, the death sport, and still let the prospectors turn a devastating, career-altering ACL rehab into an ad campaign ("All in for Week 1").
Entering the new season, it's gone. Griffin is now a backup quarterback with immense jersey sales. He is also, for the first time as a pro, simply a young man stripped bare, fighting for a job, a reputation, a career, someone needing to prove that yesterday's success will translate into a successful tomorrow, someone hopefully respectful of just how hard it is to be a great player. Griffin entered the NFL as a fantasy, a marketing concoction: the leader who had never led NFL players, the elite quarterback who had never won a playoff game, the post-racial symbol for a place that didn't exist. The prospectors set him up, and he fell for their seduction.
The game has devoured him, and it is unlikely anyone will learn from his fall. The cautionary tales of Griffin, Genie Bouchard, Johnny Manziel and even the injury-cursed Derrick Rose won't stop the prospectors from selling the millennial template, nor will it stop the athletes -- whose careers are short enough even if they don't suffer a debilitating injury -- from taking their money. But it feels as though it is also a good idea to avoid the seduction. If Griffin hadn't allowed his sponsors to sell both his arrival and comeback, maybe he would have received more leniency, maybe his injuries and struggle would have generated more sympathy, and maybe the cruelty of his current position -- having to face the world with the kryptonite of a bum leg -- wouldn't feel so cruel.
There are very few like James who fulfill the Hall of Fame forecast, never get hurt, back up the hype, make good on the promise. The millennial template makes it harder than ever to be a superstar, because the bona fides are no longer required for getting the money. Players don't have to win for the attention. They are staked a claim, advanced the dollars. When the future success doesn't come, as Griffin has proved, the fall can be too great, the mine shaft too deep. When young black athletes do not build bridges across the racial divide -- whether promised by them, their families or handlers -- and instead opt to be apolitical, they become inauthentic, "cornball brothers," as Griffin was called three years ago on ESPN for not being what he never was. When the commercials hyping the comeback don't produce the comeback, the sponsors don't pay the price. Neither does the athlete's employer. Griffin does, blamed for reaching too high, promising too much, delivering too little.
Now there is only one path left for the former RG III, and that is redemption on his own terms. That could mean a solid NFL career, where he becomes the next Jim Plunkett, the Heisman bust with the Super Bowl MVP second act. Or it may result in a redemption of a different sort: the recognition that the prospectors were never friends, and that striking real gold has nothing to do with money.